Part-Time Policy Wonk

From Library Journal:
Public access to research just got a big legislative boost. With passage late Tuesday of the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy mandate, enacted last April as part of the 2008 appropriations act, has become permanent.
As first reported in Tuesday’s LJ Academic Newswire, the mandate, which [...]

From the Huffington Post:
Lawrence Lessig and I have been writing about the link between publisher contributions to members of the House Judiciary Committee and their support for H.R. 801 — a bill that would end the newly implemented NIH public access policy that makes all works published as part of NIH-funded research freely available online. [...]

From SPARC:
To accommodate widespread global interest in the movement toward Open Access to scholarly research results, October 19 – 23, 2009 will mark the first international Open Access Week. The now-annual event, expanded from one day to a full week, presents an opportunity to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access to research, including access [...]

From the Digital Curation Centre:
Many readers will be familiar with Creative Commons, its ethos and the suite of licences it provides. An organisation they may be less familiar with is Science Commons.
Science Commons is a branch of Creative Commons that aims to make the Web work for science the way that it currently works for [...]

From Library Journal:
In a broad call to action, more than 30 of the nation’s law schools and law librarians have signed the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship. In essence, the statement urges law schools to adopt digital communication, forgo print, and publish, archive, and widely disseminate its scholarship online.

From the Financial Times:
It is hard for politicians to do anything that would shock me but I have to say that John Conyers, a US Congressman, has done it. In the process, he has taught us a lot about how far we have to go, all over the world, before we get our science policy [...]

From All Things Considered:
Google wants to give you access to its huge database of scanned, out-of-print books, but the company is going to charge for it. Robert Darnton, head librarian at Harvard University, says the deal violates a basic American principle — that knowledge should be free and accessible to all.

From Library Journal:
In yet another major step toward an open access future, the Boston University (BU) faculty and administration this week voted unanimously to endorse an institution-wide, open access system. Just over a year after Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced its groundbreaking open access policy, BU officials said their policy went one [...]

From the National Science Foundation:
If you offer something of value to people for free while someone else charges a hefty sum of money for the same type of product, one would logically assume that most people would choose the free option. According to new research in today’s edition of the journal Science, if the product [...]

From SLA’s Public Policy Blog:
Several organizations, including SLA, submitted a statement to the Obama Transition Team on public access. “Public Access to the Published Results of Publicly Funded Research Will Benefit the Economy, Science, and Health” states that peer-reviewed articles reporting the results of scientific research funded by U.S. tax dollars should be made publicly [...]